It Takes A Village

It Takes A Village

SalesHood Book Excerpt….

I witnessed the magic of building a community of sales team supporters. I am often invited to join the regional team meetings led by the different sales managers. I am able to see how team meetings are executed across a wide range of sales managers.

Dan Dal Degan (DDD), an accomplished sales executive I worked very closely with at salesforce.com, ran great team meetings, which he called “sales huddles,” a great cultural stamp that really exemplifies team building and the notion of a community. What was unique to me about the way DDD ran his meetings was how he created an agenda and assembled folks from across the company. He understood the importance of making those connections between his sales team and the supporting team members who were indirectly motivated to help the team. Product leaders would attend to educate his team on ways to sell new products. Field marketers would attend, as they were motivated to drive up lead generation in partnering with the sales team to launch marketing events. Partners would attend to help propel customer success together. Finance and legal would attend, too, as they were motivated to make sure that proposals, contracts, and orders were processed correctly. There was always a social component as well, where teams would be able to network with one another.

DDD used his sales huddles as a way to make all the resources known and available to his team in a very empowering way. It increased their confidence. His team always felt blanketed by resources from the company focused on making them money. I look to DDD’s sales huddles as a best practice and one that should be part of the entrepreneurial spirit of every team.

There are many dimensions to this story that are relevant to the entrepreneurial sales manager. First, it takes vision for a sales manager to have a master plan of all the resources and people required to make a team successful. DDD understood where he and his team needed to put some emphasis to grow the business. More importantly, he brought together experts who could help his team fill those gaps. Secondly, it takes strong relationships and relationship-building skills to be able to pull together a diverse team of people who are indirectly aligned in an organizational matrix. Consider the amount of work required to rally the folks; you have to reach out to them, entice them to join the team meeting, and then muster the charisma necessary to keep such a diverse group motivated and inspired to contribute to the greater good of the team’s success. DDD did all of this with great skill.

He’s an inspiration to every sales manager who wants to help her salespeople win as a team!

Elay Cohen is the author of SalesHood: How Winning Sales Managers Inspire Sales Teams to Succeed and the co-founder of SalesHood, a SaaS sales enablement platform and community for sales professionals. Elay is the former Senior Vice President of Sales Productivity at Salesforce. Recognized as the company's "2011 Top Executive", and credited for creating and executing all of Salesforce's sales productivity programs that accelerated its growth from $300M to $3B+ in revenue. The sales training and sales support innovations delivered over these years by Elay and his team to thousands of sales reps resulted in unprecedented hypergrowth. He also created the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) category.